Precision 450 hard drive install

Is it an ide (flat wide data cable & 4 cable power cable) hard drive? There will be jumper pins near the data cable socket to set one as master and the other as slave.

you fail

As I recall the 4600 uses EIDE hard drives so you won't have SATA plugs. You may be able to get an adapter but it would be easier to install another PATA drive that will fit natively.

Power Supply Removing the Power Supply CAUTION: Before you begin any of the procedures in this section, follow the safety instructions in your Owner's Manual or Product Information Guide. CAUTION: To guard against electrical shock, always unplug your computer from the electrical outlet before removing the cover.

1. Follow the procedures in "Before You Begin."
   
   
2. Remove the fan assembly.
   
   
3. Disconnect the AC power cable from the AC power connector on the back of the power supply.
   
   
4. Unplug the DC power cables from the drives and system board.
   
   
5. Remove the four screws that secure the power supply to the back of the computer.

OR

As you add more devices to your Dell Dimension 4600 desktop, it is important to ensure there is enough electrical power being fed to the components. While the 250 Watt power supply that comes standard with the Dell Dimension 4600 is acceptable at stock settings, it is almost certainly not capable of providing power for many more devices such as graphics cards and multiple hard drives. If you add such devices, you also should upgrade your Dell Dimension 4600 power supply.

Heres a link from DELL,it has all the correct parts and manuals for you,

This section is titled Removing and Installing Parts by DELL.

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim4600/en/4600/sm/parts.htm

Your memory is DDR Ram.

check in the bios that it is your new hardrive it is seeing, and not your old one still sitting in thr bios memory, as taking out the battery doesnt always delete the cmos memory.

There shoul be an option in the bios to auto recognise the drive

Yes it does. It may not have an IDE cable if using SATA hard drive, but it does have a port on the motherboard to plug in the cable you take from your 4600.

Don't forget to rate your answers please!

That particular Dell uses a power supply with non-standard wiring. The plug is the same size as an ATX plug, but it's wired differently. If you were to replace motherboard & plug in the standard power supply, it would damage the supply, or the motherboard, or both. Also, the front panel plugs (for power & power LED & hard drive indicator) are proprietary as well. Ideally you should replace it with another Dell Dimension 4600 motherboard. I've found replacements for reasonable prices on some of the auction places on the web. I recently replaced a failed motherboard in my Dimension 8300 with one I got from a popular auction site, I think my cost was about $59 plus shipping.

The other option would be to remove the hard drive, video card (if any), and optical drives, and consider a 'barebones' package from various sites such as geeks or newegg.

Put the CD in your CD Drive and shut off the pc. Then start it up again making sure the CD is still in the drive. You will then be asked if you want to boot from CD. Press any key to confirm this (it might skip asking you if it detects that your hard-drive is already blank) Then you want to let it run its install routine. Im not sure what options it will give you but the ones you are looking for is FULL install.

Did you reinstall windows or was this a second hard drive that you installed?